soilKey: Automated Soil Profile Classification per WRB 2022, 'SiBCS' 5 and USDA Soil Taxonomy 13

Implements deterministic classification keys for the World Reference Base for Soil Resources 2022 (4th edition) and the Brazilian System of Soil Classification ('SiBCS', 5th edition). Provides a unified profile representation with explicit per-attribute provenance, multimodal extraction from field reports and photos via vision-language models, spatial priors from 'SoilGrids' and national soil maps, and gap-filling of soil attributes from Vis-NIR or MIR spectra via the Open Soil Spectral Library ('OSSL'). The taxonomic key itself is never delegated to a language model; LLMs are restricted to schema-validated extraction. Each classification result reports a key trace, a provenance-aware evidence grade, and ambiguities that further measurement would resolve.

Version: 0.9.155
Depends: R (≥ 4.1)
Imports: R6, data.table, yaml, cli, rlang
Suggests: aqp, SoilTaxonomy, mpspline2, terra, foreign, sf, chromote, munsellinterpol, pls, prospectr, resemble, ellmer, httr, jsonlite, jsonvalidate, pdftools, magick, shiny (≥ 1.7.0), DT, bslib, shinyWidgets, plotly, leaflet, htmltools, withr, DBI, RSQLite, testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown
Published: 2026-06-22
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.soilKey
Author: Hugo Rodrigues ORCID iD [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Hugo Rodrigues <rodrigues.machado.hugo at gmail.com>
BugReports: https://github.com/HugoMachadoRodrigues/soilKey/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
URL: https://github.com/HugoMachadoRodrigues/soilKey, https://hugomachadorodrigues.github.io/soilKey/
NeedsCompilation: no
Citation: soilKey citation info
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: soilKey results

Documentation:

Reference manual: soilKey.html , soilKey.pdf
Vignettes: Getting started with soilKey (source, R code)
Começando com soilKey (PT-BR) (source, R code)
End-to-end WRB 2022 classification with Ch 6 names (source, R code)
Cross-system classification: WRB 2022, SiBCS 5, USDA Soil Taxonomy (source, R code)
Vision-language extraction of pedon data (Module 2) (source, R code)
Spatial prior + OSSL spectra pipeline (Modules 3 & 4) (source, R code)
Benchmarking soilKey against WoSIS (source, R code)
End-to-end pipeline: Gemma 4 + spatial + spectral + key + GIS export (source, R code)
KSSL + NASIS: multi-level USDA Soil Taxonomy benchmark (source, R code)
Um perfil real do A ao Z (estilo Embrapa, em portugues) (source, R code)
The soilKey Pro Shiny app (source, R code)
Field-photo-only classification (source, R code)
Provenance-weighted classification uncertainty (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: soilKey_0.9.155.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: soilKey_0.9.97.zip, r-release: soilKey_0.9.155.zip, r-oldrel: soilKey_0.9.97.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): soilKey_0.9.155.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): soilKey_0.9.155.tgz, r-release (x86_64): soilKey_0.9.155.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): soilKey_0.9.155.tgz
Old sources: soilKey archive

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